Don't Give Up Your Day Job

There's been some discussion lately about writers' incomes. A couple of months ago the Writer's Union of Canada released a survey claiming that their average writer's income was down 27 percent from what it was three years ago. (And the average they provided was under $10,000 Canadian, or horrifically under the minimum wage.) Earlier this month John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow both had pieces up concerning a recent US Authors Guild survey on the same subject.

"I could be happy as a writer, if I could just get over this
tremendous passion for money."

Both of these gents have pointed out that the US survey isn't very good (I haven't been able to find data on the Canadian survey, only news reports based on its press release), and I will add that there's more than a little bit of vested interest behind both surveys.

But the point I want to make about this (which of course Scalzi already has) is exemplified in the title of this post. Nobody should really be expecting to make a decent living—or any sort of living at all, really—from writing fiction. Unless they are John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow, of course.

I know a fair number of writers, and count many of them as friends. Of these friends, only Cory could be said to be supporting himself with his fiction—and Cory also derives income from Boing Boing and from speaking gigs (and all the more power to him).

And there is nothing wrong with this. Dr. Johnson may have been speaking the truth for the 18th century when he wrote "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," but you'll note he did not specify how much money. We should not be basing our expectations on the performance of the top one percent of writers any more than we should base them on the top one percent of any field.

It always surprises me how many people don't seem to have absorbed this lesson. I suppose ambition is a good thing. But it's not so good when ambition leads you to self-imposed poverty, something I have seen all too much of. There can be a modus vivendi between ambition and comfort. In the next few days (amidst all the other goings-on here) I want to discuss that modus in a bit more detail.